Environmentalist Mark Seal started up a forum where global warming could be debated, but he had some initial concerns:

I was initially worried as to where I would find people who didn’t believe in global warming. I had planned to create a furious debate, but in my experience global warming was such a universally accepted issue that I expected to have to dredge the slums of the internet in order to find a couple of deniers who could keep the argument thriving.

Happily, things turned out all right:

I was swamped by climate skeptics who did a good job of frightening off the few brave Greens who slogged out the debate with. Whilst there was a lot of rubbish written, the truth was that they didn’t so much frighten the Greens away - they comprehensively demolished them with a more in depth understanding of the science, cleverly thought out arguments, and some very smart answers. If you want to learn about the physics of convection currents, gas chromatography, or any number of climate science topics then read some of the early debates on TalkClimateChange. I didn’t believe a word of it, but I had to admit that these guys were good.

In the following months the situation hardly changed. As the forum continued to grow, as the blog began to catch traffic, and as I continued to try and recruit green members I continued to be disappointed with the debate. In short, and I am sorry to say it, anti-greens (Reds, as we call them) appear to be more willing to comment, more structured, more able to quote peer reviewed research, more apparently rational and apparently wider read and better informed.

In the comments, someone expresses incredulity that there are any peer reviewed papers that don't support alarmism. As a public service, here are a few links. They come from the Global Warming Clearing House, a newish site that tries to post pro- anti- and neutral links every day. The site author summed up the conclusions this balanced approach had led him to in his first month, as follows (heavily edited down to just some of the headings):

The Global Temperature is actually going down.

Measuring data is difficult and prone to errors. Measuring data over a long time is even more so.

CO2 reacts logarithmically so that the more that enters the atmosphere the less effect it has.

QUOTEHigh-resolution records from Antarctic ice cores show that carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 80 to 100 parts per million by volume 600 ± 400 years after the warming of the last three deglaciations.

QUOTEA. there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects, B. there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet, C. the frequently mentioned difference of 33 degrees Celsius is a meaningless number calculated wrongly, D. the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately, E. the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical, F. thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified.

QUOTEThe Little Ice Age and the subsequent warming were global in extent. Several Holocene fluctuations in snowline, comparable in magnitude to that of the post-Little Ice Age warming, occurred in the Swiss Alps. Borehole records both in polar ice and in wells from all continents suggest the existence of a Medieval Warm Period. Finally, two multidecade-duration droughts plagued the western United States during the latter part of the Medieval Warm Period. I consider this evidence sufficiently convincing to merit an intensification of studies aimed at elucidating Holocene climate fluctuations, upon which the warming due to greenhouse gases is superimposed.

3 comments:

Henry may be missing the fact that governments world wide, when not engaged in perpetual war, need to keep the masses alarmed and feeling the need for 'protection', also to support new tax regimes to raise more finances. The natural cycles have been with us for millennia. The 'environmental' movement and localised pollution was a key pawn latching on to the development of anthropological climate change on a global scale to suit the likes of Mr Gore and his carbon credit companies, with a science still not fully understood it is ripe for exploitation and propaganda. Big money manipulates the masses for more big money and more power every time. Thankfully, their rush to be greedy has been illuminated Jonathan Swift's comment 'Falsehoods fly, and truth comes limping along behind' [sic]. Many thanks for the blog.